NOTED

Tiens! Dis donc. Just a few weeks ago, posting on the absurdity of planting the Eiffel Tower, we'd taken aim at the Met as well for the shabby way it has (mis-)treated its monumental beaux-arts façade, using it as a glorified laundry-line since the days of Thomas Hoving.

Clearly others have been thinking the same thing as well, most important among them the person writing a check for the $60-odd million it will cost to renovate the 4-block-long strip of the Museum's Fifth Avenue street frontage: the 0.01% of the 1%, multigazillionaire David Koch.


Pandering to barely conceivable wealth, the NY Times article leads you to believe that Koch was the one who had the Eureka! moment, after he'd seen the renovated fountain at Lincoln Center, and that the project sprang from his imagination like Venus from Saturn's brow.


Apparently not quite. The Times also reported (below the fold, of course) that Emily Rafferty, the Met's president, had been looking for a donor for years. And years. (Echoes of Saint Simon, who wrote how the Sun King's architect, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, always planted an obvious error in his plans so that Louis XIV could point it out, and then he would profess astonishment that he himself had not seen it and praise the king for his penetrating eye, thereby leading him wherever he wanted. Plus ça change...)

So, thank you Mr. Koch for the check, thank you Ms. Rafferty for your persistence and evident fund-raising skills. And what exactly does one get for $60 not-nearly-as-big-as-they-used-to-be ones these days?

Pretty much what the Louvre got a decade ago (less the glass pyramid, the upscale underground shopping mall, and Dan Brown and Tom Hanks). The planning was done by the Philadelphia-based landscape design firm OLIN, who have also renovated other important Manhattan public spaces, Bryant Park and Columbus Circle.


To paraphrase another of Saint Simon's anecdotes, this one when Louis XIV asked Le Notre what he thought of Hardouin-Mansart's work in the gardens of Marly, "Hire a landscaper and you get a landscape." Gone are those triste 70s lozenge-shaped fountains stranded amid acres of pink granite, like the pompous afterthoughts they were. We now will have, as of 2014, two large, square I.M. Pei/Louvresque fontaines flanking the steps before the William Morris Hunt main façade, and beyond them pairs of square bosquets of untrimmed London plane trees with seating beneath, just as you'd find in the Tuileries gardens.



Fronting the outer McKim, Mead & White end pavilions, which project farthest toward Fifth Avenue, we get long allées of iconic clipped lindens redolent of the Champs-Elysées and the gardens of Le Notre. And we get café seating with rollout awnings just like you get all over Paris (though you'll probably be tasered if you try to smoke while sipping your Chardonney there).


We don't want to quibble here—after all, who doesn't like a tree?—and we rather like the bustle that will result from the shoe-horned fountains and bosquests-cum-food courts, and are amused by the provocation of Descartean plotted, poodle-clipped and tortured trees appearing in Manhattan, but must note that the allées are far too close to the buildings (well, truth be told everything is far too crammed and far too close to the buildings, but hey, it's New York). Clearly though, this idea of disengaging important public monuments from their surroundings is about as dead as classical architecture itself, and we doubt that even Mr. Koch is wealthy and influential enough to buy and raze the four blocks facing the Met to Madison Avenue (Park would be ideal) and get the job done right. He shouldn't feel too badly though; even the Sun King was forced to content himself with a rump front yard for the Louvre, unable to dislodge some very stubborn clerical holdouts in the church of St-Germain l'Auxerrois.


Hopefully the Met will also take another cue from the Tuileries and not max out on the Au Bon Pain kiosks but also find a few appropriate spots for public sculpture as well.

Curiously, and against all current French practice, the Met wishes to encourage use of secondary entrances accessible at the plaza level. This flies in the face of French logic, which holds that the larger and more important the public building and the greater the attendance, the fewer entrances should be open because only two security guards can be afforded in the operating budget, though massive amounts can be spent on the design of monumental doors that will never be used.

(Below, the Opéra Bastille's grandiose entrance 20 minutes before the opening curtain, and the Louvre's solution of how to enliven its vast inner court.)



If the architect has for some reason included more than two doors, as is often the case, they are best condemned with these plastic chains (approved by the fire inspectors, apparently as they will quickly melt in case of a serious conflagration), and visitors are to be herded with bicycle-stand barriers, neither of which any public building in Paris worth its sel de mer can ever have enough of.

If the Met really wants to go the whole nine metres here, we'd highly recommend they close off the main stairs with a few dozen yards of plastic chain and route all visitors via a makeshift labyrinth through any random entrance they see fit, chosen in a weekly lottery held by their maintenance staff.



At night, the Met's façade will now be lit by low-energy LED lights, instead of spots from across the street, just as in the Louvre's stunning Cour Carrée. All in all, a consummately pleasant, coherent and inviting plan that will turn the Met's Fifth Avenue frontage into the world's longest sidewalk café.



Unfortunately, Mayor Bloomberg has refused the Met's proposal to flood Fifth Avenue in the 80s and replace the M4 bus with MTA-run bâteaux-mouches.


No mention is made of gendarmes on roller blades or motionless street mimes or roving bands of fiercely cool fashionistas or bad accordian interpretations of Piaf or even if Woody Allen will be lurking about, but surely these necessary if minor clichés will not be forgotten to ensure the Met's complete francophilic transformation.


We'd only point out one inexcusable faux pas that gives the whole game away: those ridiculously suburban foundation plantings, pasted against a classical limestone façade that runs nearly ¼ mile long.

Tellement américain.

A serious project is under development to plant the Eiffel Tower, with work to begin as early as June if the Paris city council votes its approval, reported Le Figaro newspaper and CNN.


600,000 plants, sacks of growing medium and watering tubes together weighing 378 tons would be attached to the 1073-foot tall structure in a $96 million plan overseen by the Ginger engineering firm, Vinci Construction and the architect Claude Bucher.


Apparently the plants are already being raised in nurseries and a reduced-scale model of the tower has been built over a period of two years in a Paris suburb to test the idea's feasibility. The plants would be left to grow on the tower for four years, to be removed in 2016.

That in a nutshell is what is being reported, and it's hard to know where to start when faced with such monumental decadence, but let's begin at the beginning of the radical idea that urban structures can and should be a garden, which takes us, surprisingly, to Vienna in the mid-1980s and the Hundertwasser Haus, designed by the Viennese artist of the same name.


A piebald ode to the romanticized Teutonic vision of das Leben alternativ (or the counterculture) painted in a bright de Stijl palette, the idiosyncratic Viennese apartment block features a literal roof garden, trees planted in living rooms and undulating floors ("an uneven floor is a melody to the feet"). Both urban folly and provocation, the Hundertwasser Haus was a manifesto celebrating rustic handcraft and whimsical impracticality at a time of slick commercial atria sheathed in polarized glass sheltering rows of ficus trees, the iconic Trump Tower (below, the pink marble and polished brass atrium) being the apex—or nadir—of the trend.


More recently, the Parisian urban eco-gardener Patrick Blanc has been creating "vertical gardens" and gained great notoriety with his 2005 project at the Quai Branly Museum of First Peoples in Paris (below). Blanc, who obviously knows his plants, perfected the system of growing plants in pouches of planting medium irrigated by nutrient-rich water carried by a skein of drip lines.


Spectacularly lush and visually compelling, Blanc's sensuously cascading plant walls have become enormously popular with corporate clients wanting to make an eco-friendly statement with maximum visual impact. They are beautiful and truly stunning... and oh-so trendy. Affixed to a bare wall, as below, these vertical gardens can make a compelling statement and add immeasurable beauty, and quite simply are wonderful and nearly wondrous additions to most urban spaces, period.


But. Ah yes, there is always that "but," and in this case it's a big one: But the Eiffel Tower?

Is this eco- or ego-gardening? What madness possesses people to want to turn one of the most famous engineering feats of the 19th century, the symbol of France, into the world's largest scaffold for plants, which can after all be grown just about anywhere else? Why isn't this massive investment of time and resources being used to create, say, an innovative garden in Paris, instead of disfiguring and possibly weakening a great historical landmark?


Well, these are all rhetorical questions; you certainly know. That particular madness is of course trendiness. Fashion. Cool. Thinking one is right-thinking. And not a little bit of free-floating arrogance and self-referential decadence (BoBo nombrilisme, or "bohemian bourgeoisie navel staring" as it's known here). A corrosive brew indeed, and it is no surprise that this is occurring in Paris, world capital of fashion and when, for the first time, the younger generations have become bored with their past—a true sea change in France's self conception.

It is also proof that the 20th century's mental stupidity (for it is not even worthy of the word mentality) in treating the great monuments of our ancestors with disdain is alive and well and actually thriving. The poster child for that is of course the late Penn Station in Manhattan. In France, it is le feu Les Halles (below), the grandiose, old central market torn down under Pompidou (who suffered from Manhattan envy) to make way for a massive underground metro and suburban-train hub and a shopping mall with—you guessed it—hideously cheap atria lined with ficus trees. The White Hole, it is unaffectionately called here. Inevitably, it was so awful and so badly constructed that it is now being razed and replaced with a trendy new eco-friendly shopping mall, which will carry it along for another 40 years.



Other, lesser desecrations include Daniel Buren's infamous Two Platforms installation of 1986 in the courtyard of the Palais-Royal, home of the Ministry of Culture, and the more recent wrapping of the handsome beaux-arts-meets-art-deco façade of the old Louvre Department Store in aluminum spaghetti à la Cy Twombly, also perpetrated by the Culture ministry when it purchased and renovated the property to serve as an annex.



But Paris hardly stands alone here. A perfect American example of people-who-should-know-better-but-don't is the staff of Metropolitan Museum of Art, which since the late seventies (under go-go Tom Hoving) has seen fit to use its monumental beaux-arts façade as a banner support, even though there are flag poles in the plazas to either side that would be perfect for the purpose. One can only hope that the Met, trapped in 70s æsthetic amber with its pop-art colored banners, tired M® shopping bags and chunky tubular brass handrails, will bring itself into the 21st century responsibly and not plant its celebrated landmark façade but rather reveal and light it properly. (They might also—though no rush as it's only been a century or so now—finally get around to commissioning someone to carve those stacks of limestone piled atop the cornice into something resembling art, seeing as it is an art museum and not that poor.)


As for the Eiffel Tower, it has been used as a billboard for at least two decades now. First it was bathed with colored lights at night, copying the Empire State Building, then it received a dazzling star-like light-show for the millenium which sparkled for the first ten minutes of every hour (truly inspired, but apparently opening Pandora's box), and in 2008 (below) it became a propaganda poster for the ill-fated EU constitution, reduced to the Lisbon treaty. It has also been decorated to promote other such political ventures.


Now it may well become the world's largest trellis frame and most expensive and inefficient "carbon trap," to go with the French government's dubious obsession with the real carbon trap, carbon taxes.

"To the glory of France!"